


Ephemeris

by Ladybug_21



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Leia Princess of Alderaan - Claudia Gray
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-09-23 03:55:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17072993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: Three moments that Luke Skywalker and Amilyn Holdo never shared onscreen.





	Ephemeris

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [tom_bedlam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tom_bedlam), who patiently tolerated my ceaseless screaming about how much I love Teenage Holdo and the entire Organa family for a solid few months after I read _Leia, Princess of Alderaan_. You wanted a fic in which Luke and Holdo meet each other, my friend, and here it is, with apologies for finishing it about a year later than I'd intended. Many thanks for the inspiration, especially with regards to your conviction that Holdo was _definitely_ in the crowd at the medal ceremony that ended Episode IV.
> 
> This fic also ties into my much longer story [_Triangulation_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13772724), which describes what I think Amilyn Holdo spent her time doing between _Leia, Princess of Alderaan_ and TLJ, as well as more of my headcanons concerning Gatalenta. However, said longer story includes some *really* big spoilers for both _Leia, Princess of Alderaan_ and _Bloodline_ , so please read at your own risk, if you're not already familiar with both of Claudia Gray's books...
> 
> All legal rights belong to LFL and Disney.

YAVIN 4

 _So this is what victory feels like_ , Leia Organa thought to herself as she gazed out over the assembled crowd, beaming with pride. Trumpets blared triumphantly as her boys —  _her boys_  — turned to face the crowd as well, Luke's excited grin as brilliant as the medal shining on his chest, Han doing his utmost to look unimpressed by all of the pomp and circumstance (and nearly succeeding).

They had won. Not much, for the Battle of Yavin was only one of the countless battles that the Rebel Alliance had fought and lost, a single stone in the path of a relentlessly surging river. But around such stones, currents changed and altered. The obliteration of the Death Star was no small feat, and moreover was one that the Empire could neither deny nor hide, no matter how furiously its propaganda machine scrambled to dampen the reverberations of the explosion. This victory, more than anything else to date, proved that the Rebel Alliance was a force with which to be reckoned.

This victory was the closest that Leia could get to avenging the destruction of Alderaan.

A lump rose in Leia's throat, and she took a deep breath to steady herself.  _They would be so proud of you today_ , she told herself.  _By the grace of the Force, they_ are _so proud of you today_.

The medal ceremony blared to a proclamatory finish, and the crowd stilled, waiting for Leia to speak. Her prepared speech in honor of the dead spilled from her as smoothly and as effortlessly as had the practiced lines that she had spoken on her Day of Demand, what felt like a lifetime ago. Only this time, her mother and father were the honorees, and Leia stood alone, the sole remaining royal of Alderaan. The air on either side of her felt chilled, too empty without the warm presence of her parents to support her.

"Let us take a moment to honor the lost souls of Alderaan," she heard herself say. "To honor Viceroy Bail Organa and Queen Breha Organa. May they forever be remembered."

The silence that followed felt painfully long. Tears sprang to Leia's eyes, and she blinked them away furiously, running a hand swiftly across her cheeks. She glanced out across the crowd, relieved to see that every rebel assembled had bowed their head in respect and had missed her moment of grief... until her gaze finally met that of the one person whose head was still raised.

Amilyn Holdo, her hair fuchsia to complement her deep purple dress, was staring straight at Leia, her eyes as watery as those of the princess.

From anyone else, it might have felt like an act of defiance or a show of irreverence. From Amilyn, though, Leia recognized it instantly as an impulse borne of compassion for a friend, of the desire to ensure that Leia knew how deeply Amilyn felt her loss. For some reason, the solidarity made Leia want to weep even harder.

Amilyn's lower lip trembled, and she brought her clasped hands up to her chest, as if in prayer. Leia nodded once in acknowledgement, and the Gatalentan offered her the smallest of supportive smiles.

Finally, the moment was over, and business resumed as usual: General Dodonna announced the evacuation plans, and the Rebel Alliance rose to its collective feet, ready to follow orders. Leia stood fixed to her spot, an appropriate smile plastered across her face, as her rebels slowly began to disperse, chatting loudly among themselves. Wedge Antilles strode to the front of temple and clapped Luke on the back proudly. Chewbacca threw back his head and roared happily, and Han immediately sprang to his side, some cynically cheerful witticism on the tip of his tongue.

Leia took the opportunity to turn away from the crowd, desperate to compose herself before springing back into action as the leader that her fighters needed.

As Wedge congratulated Luke a final time and dashed off to prepare his ship for evacuation, Luke glanced over his shoulder at Leia. The princess had her back towards him, but he recognized that the graceful curve of her spine was bent in mourning. On impulse, he placed a foot on the step before him, a mere second away from ascending the stairs to comfort her, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him.

When Luke turned back to see whose it was, his eyes widened at the peculiar girl who was gazing solemnly at him.

"Give her a little time," advised the girl in a low and curiously monotone voice.

Luke stared. The girl smiled faintly at him and nodded in greeting.

"Amilyn Holdo," she introduced herself.

"Luke Skywalker," he replied.

"I know," she reminded him in a neutral, matter-of-fact tone. (Luke kicked himself mentally; he  _had_  just been given a medal in a very public ceremony, after all.) "Congratulations. It sounds like it was quite an expedition. You must be an exceptionally good pilot."

"Or else very lucky," admitted Luke, somewhat sheepishly and somewhat dishonestly.

He wasn't sure how to explain what he had felt when he had fired the shots that destroyed the Death Star; it was more than just focus, and far more than pure chance. But even a celebrated hero would sound either absurd or insane to insist that the Force had been with him,  _literally_. The Jedi were little more than a legend, after all, and Luke's ego wasn't nearly large enough to sustain that sort of a claim without a jot of supporting evidence. ( _Han might have the bravado to pull off that kind of a boast_ , Luke thought to himself briefly, before he reminded himself that he was trying not to compare himself to Han so often.)

But Amilyn Holdo had tilted her head to one side and was shaking it slightly.

"People don't just get lucky with things like this," she informed him, not condescending so much as mildly surprised. "You had to put in hours and hours of work to be able to fly and shoot like that. Not just anyone could have done it."

"I could just as easily have missed," Luke pointed out.

"But you didn't," concluded Amilyn happily, "and here we all are."

Luke glanced at his new acquaintance again. So many of the brave rebels he had met over the past few days had worn the same expression that he now associated with Leia: grim scowls of frustration, lightened only occasionally by fleeting sparks of hope. But Amilyn's demeanor was calm, even if not completely grounded; she carried herself with a sense of serenity that, while not exactly happy, lacked the exhausted weight or frenetic propulsion that characterized so many of the other beings careening around them on Yavin 4. Luke found the contrast both refreshing and deeply confusing.

"So, um, are you involved in the Rebellion?" he asked finally. (Of the plethora of questions in his brain that were vying to be asked, this one seemed the least potentially offensive.) "Or is this your home planet?"

"Oh, no," laughed Amilyn. "I'm from Gatalenta. I just wanted to be here to celebrate in person with all of you today. Leia's an old friend."

"Really?"

"Well, not  _old_ , of course. What would be a better term for it? A sunbeam friend, perhaps."

Luke stared at her.

"A 'sunbeam friend'?"

"Yes," Amilyn said with an unfocused grin. "I like that. Leia is a sunbeam friend. Even when she's not around to make me feel warm and cheerful, I know it's because she's off lighting the way for someone else."

There was an odd logic to that description, now that she had explained it. Luke ruffled his hair unconsciously with one hand.

"Well, we're sure glad to have her," he said lamely.

"And I'm glad you do." To Luke's bewilderment, the fuchsia-haired girl reached out and took his hands in hers. "With enough luck, you'll be able to spread the light all across the galaxy."

Luke furrowed his brow.

"I thought you just said you didn't believe in luck."

"Oh, I do," Amilyn reassured him with a vigorous nod. "I just think that much more in life can be attributed to hard work than to luck, although the latter never hurts. Either way, stay safe, and may the Force be with you."

Amilyn let go of Luke's hands, and turned to greet Leia, who had recovered from her moment of melancholy and was ready to receive her visitor with a genuine smile. The hero of the hour stared after his new acquaintance bemusedly, then shrugged and ambled back towards Wedge and the other pilots. There would be time enough later to celebrate with Leia.

"So you met Luke, I see," Leia was saying to Amilyn, meanwhile.

"He's very sweet," Amilyn smiled. "I can see why he made such a good addition to your team. You have similar auras."

"Luke and me?" Leia raised an eyebrow. "I can't think of anyone with a temperament less similar to mine."

"Oh, but auras are nothing like temperament! Didn't they teach you that when you were younger?" When Leia shook her head politely, suppressing a grin, Amilyn continued earnestly: "Temperament is about how you react to situations, but aura is more about the core of who you are, and you and Luke have nearly matching profiles, from everything that I can see."

"Such as?"

"You both have wanted to make a positive impact on the world since you were young. You're both ambitious. You're both leaders thrown into positions of responsibility long before you ever expected. You both care deeply about others." Amilyn bobbed her shoulder up and down in a careless shrug.

"Isn't that a little generic?" Leia asked, as diplomatically as she could.

"Oh, perhaps. But there's something else there, too. Something intangible. I'd explain it to you, if I could, but of course the point of something being intangible is that you can't quite explain it, you know."

"Indeed." Leia glanced in General Dodonna's direction as he called her name. She reached out and took Amilyn's hands. "I have to go, but I'll be in touch soon. Thank you for being here, Amilyn, and take care."

"You, too." Amilyn grinned and kissed Leia on the cheek. "Until we meet again."

Leia quickly threw herself into preparations for the evacuations, shouting orders loudly enough to make up for her small stature, striding between X-wings as their pilots checked their fuel gauges and bickered with their astromechs. By the time she located Han and Chewie frantically trying to affix pieces of the Falcon's hold together using duct tape, she had forgotten all about Amilyn and her curious statements about Luke. Leia wouldn't think about them again until the night on Endor when Luke told her who they both really were.

* * *

GATALENTA

Luke, for his part, didn't think about Leia's curious fuchsia-haired friend again until after the war, when he ran into her again.

Or, not so much ran into her as literally tripped over her.

"I am so sorry," he began to apologize from where he was sprawled on the ground. But the person on whom he had just tripped had managed to clamber to her feet before Luke could, and now offered him a hand up.

"Luke Skywalker." She smiled down at the prone Jedi, bright blue hair falling about her temples. "Welcome to Gatalenta!"

Luke blinked, then furrowed his brow.

"I feel like we've met before," he said as he stood with the woman's help.

"We did, a long time ago." She paused and reconsidered. "Well, not that long ago. Only a few years, I suppose, which isn't that long in the grand history of time and space. On Yavin 4. The day that you got a nice medal for blowing up the Death Star."

 _Ah_.

"I'm Amilyn Holdo," she added. "I assume that you had a lot on your mind that day, so I wouldn't expect you to remember my name."

"Right. Thanks." Luke smiled. "And, um, I really am sorry for, um..."

"Oh, it's not the first time, and it probably won't be the last." Amilyn waved a hand through the air. "Getting stepped on is a hazard of meditating in the middle of a public walkway. Have you had lunch yet?"

And so Luke, bewildered anew, found himself eating sandwiches at a small café with Amilyn Holdo, a few blocks from the base of the slope on which Gatalenta's Council building perched.

"Thank you for all of your help, by the way," he told Amilyn. "I had no idea that you were the one answering all of my questions about the Gatalentan archives."

"It was very interesting, actually." Amilyn blew across the surface of her cup of tea and took a small sip. "We're all very familiar with the Force here on Gatalenta, but no one really says much about the Jedi themselves. I don't suppose you'd be interested in giving a holo-interview that we can add to our collections?"

"Me?" Luke laughed. "Oh, I don't know anything about the Jedi, really. That's why I'm here, after all — to learn everything that I don't know."

"Yes," Amilyn nodded, "but you've actually trained with two Jedi masters, if the rumors are true. And everyone says that you can use the Force easily."

Luke raised his eyebrows and shrugged with a grin as a salt cellar floated from the table next to them into his hand.

"Marvelous," Amilyn said. "Although you might not want to put too much salt on your sandwich. Longstanding medical research suggests that doing so too often might give you high blood pressure."

"Sure," Luke agreed, trying not to chuckle. He liked Amilyn Holdo more and more with each passing minute, but she was undeniably one of the strangest people he'd ever met. "The thing is, I can't explain  _how_  I use the Force. It's not something that I need to think about; it just  _happens_. So I'm not sure how much good it would do to interview me about it, if you're hoping to learn something, I don't know,  _pedagogical_  about it. Honestly, I find that it works best for me when I'm  _not_  focusing on it."

"Or focusing on it, but only in the right way, maybe," offered Amilyn.

"Exactly." Luke glanced at her. "It sounds like you've been looking through the archives yourself?"

"I haven't had time to go beyond tracking down the references you requested, unfortunately. But I've heard that Gatalenta adopted meditation as a practice from the teachings of the Jedi, and it's a similar principle. If you worry too much about meditating, then it defeats the entire purpose. So instead of worrying about whether you're doing it right, you just have to  _do_  it, and that requires a lot of indirect focus, I've found."

"Especially when people accidentally trip over you."

"Well, that was my fault," Amilyn said matter-of-factly. "It was silly of me to meditate in the middle of a walkway in a governmental complex, but I was trying to be efficient with time, and I didn't want to miss you when you arrived."

Somehow, it made perfect sense to Luke that someone as seemingly scatterbrained as Amilyn would aim to be highly efficient with time while at her day job. He assumed it was just hardwired into her the same way it was hardwired into all of the kids who had grown prematurely into adults while fighting for the Rebel Alliance, trying to be as efficient as possible with spare moments, never knowing if this hour would be their last.

"Remind me again how you know Leia?" he asked her.

Amilyn grinned broadly.

"We were in the Apprentice Legislature of the Galactic Senate," she told Luke. "Back when we were teenagers. Another thing that seems like it happened eons ago, but actually occurred within a much more recent temporal framework. I think that Leia thought that I was somewhat odd when she first met me, but she was always very kind."

Luke nodded appreciatively.

"And then one thing led to another, and we ended up receiving some unexpected intelligence and warning her father about a pending attack on the Rebel Alliance fleet, which probably saved the entire Rebellion," Amilyn added as an afterthought. "Actually, I think that's when we probably really became friends, in a serious and lasting sense."

Luke stared at her.

"That sounds like quite a start to your friendship."

"Yes, I suppose." Amilyn smiled, her gaze distant. "Things have been so busy here that I've been terrible about keeping in touch with Leia, and I imagine she's equally busy trying to get the new government up and running. But I assume you must talk to her fairly often, being her brother. Please give her my regards, won't you? And tell her that I miss her."

"Of course," Luke promised. "I'm sure she misses you, too."

"I know she does." Amilyn took another sip of tea. "That's one of the things that makes Leia such a good leader, after all — she really does care about the people around her. It makes it very easy to be loyal to her. I don't exaggerate when I say that I gladly would have died for her during the war."

"Me, too."

The two sat in silence for a moment, Amilyn chewing on a bit of sandwich, Luke wondering if the tea that he was drinking could be ordered in bulk from off-planet.

"So, what are you going to do with your research on the Jedi?" Amilyn asked Luke finally.

"Oh, you know." Luke laughed self-consciously. "I mean, I don't know if it'll  _work_ , but I'd like to pass my knowledge on to others, if I can."

"You're starting an academy."

"Something like that." Luke shrugged. "Again, I don't know if it can be done. I'm just one person, and there's so much knowledge that's been lost."

"But there's still so much that can be recovered!" Amilyn clapped her hands. "Wait until you see our archives. No doubt there are texts and maps that have been waiting in there for centuries to be rediscovered and put to use. I just know you'll walk away with something useful."

"Hopefully, but who can say if I'll be able to interpret all of it right? The odds seem pretty good that whatever I do won't be _authentic_."

"Of course not," Amilyn agreed. "But that's just how the world works, isn't it? Cultures change to fit the times. Even if the Jedi hadn't disappeared, their practices would have evolved over the past few decades regardless."

"I just..." Luke sighed heavily. "I don't want to mess this up. If I don't do this right, then an entire way of life will just disappear forever, and it will all be my fault."

"Nothing's ever really gone," Amilyn reassured him gently. "As long as the name of the Jedi endures, their legacy will endure, as well, in some shape or form. You'll just build something new and impactful on that legacy, and make whatever you build your own."

She tipped back the rest of her tea, then slid a coded cube across the table to Luke.

"To grant you access to the archives," she told him as she rose from her chair. "I have to go prepare for a week-long conference with tea farmers on the other side of the planet. My transport leaves in a few hours, so I might not see you again. But it's been very nice getting to know you. And good luck with everything."

"You, too." Luke stood and returned the bow that Amilyn gave him. "May the Force be with you."

"And you, as well, Master Jedi." Amilyn quirked a grin at him. "Even though it already clearly is."

* * *

BEYOND

_feeling the surge of adrenaline as she set the coordinates and pulled the hyperdrive and watched the stars in the windows shudder and blur as they stretched through time and space before the cosmos exploded around her in a noiseless rending that left no time for pain and suffering or even fear but rather only the remaining conviction that her friends might somehow survive all of this and that they were the spark that would light the fire that would burn and burn and burn_

_amidst the blazing red of two suns weaving in and out of each other's paths in the binary sunset  
and sensing his physical form slipping away as he embraced the ease of nothingness and understanding that came with accepting the inevitability of age and self-doubt and failure with grace because he had done everything that he could to save everything that they had fought so hard to build and just maybe redeemed himself for running when he knew he should have remained_

"You again!" she exclaims, offering him a bow.

"And you," he replies. "I didn't expect to see you here."

"My planet understands the Force," she reminds him. "But that doesn't mean that I can use it to remain."

"Of course," he agrees.

"You can return, though," she says, tilting her head as she observes that his outline shows no signs of fading.

"Yes," he agrees. "But it might be better if I didn't."

"Why not?" she asks. "She may need you."

"She's not the one I'm worried about. We had time to say our goodbyes."

She studies his face carefully.

"You sacrificed yourself for her. For the Resistance."

"Yes." He returns her gaze. "So did you."

_for the millions of voices that suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced and for the downtrodden and oppressed and for those who turn their gaze to the stars and dream of freedom and live on hope alone because_

"I'm so sorry," he says, "for how wrong everything went..."

"Don't apologize," she interrupts kindly. "I made my share of mistakes, too. And you can help those we left correct yours."

She takes his hands, but neither feels the other's touch.

"I will not see her again," she tells him. "But please, if you return,  _when_  you return, tell her that I love her."

"Of course," he promises. "Although she already knows."

She smiles as her intangible hands become less and less distinct.

"May the Force be with you," her voice says as it dissolves into the invisible currents that surround them.

"Always," he responds to no one.

_those who fade from view and fade from touch and fade from memory still remain and remain and remain here in this energy field created by all living things that surrounds and penetrates and binds the galaxy together where everything is nothing and nothing is everything and no one is ever really gone_


End file.
